Justine Wise Polier (1903-1987)

Justine, at approximately age ten,
with her mother, Louise Waterman Wise

Justine Wise Polier standing
in front of a self-portrait by her mother, Louise Waterman Wise,
in the adoption agency founded by Wise in 1916

Justine and husband Shad Polier

A brilliant jurist and activist
on issues related to child
welfare and the law, Justine Wise Polier was also one of the
earliest and most vocal critics of religious and racial matching
in adoption. Although her name is unlikely to be counted in the
top ranks of civil rights and social justice advocates, Justine
Wise Polier deserves to be remembered alongside figures such as
Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt. She worked tirelessly as a childrens
advocate, was the recipient of numerous national awards and honors,
and spoke and wrote widely on legal and social issues for a broad
audience. Her brilliant career was nourished by a long and supportive
marriage to second husband Shad Polier, an attorney who shared his
wifes passionate devotion to childrens causes. Her first
husband, Lee Tulin, a professor of criminal law at Yale Law School,
died of leukemia in 1932.

Polier was born in Portland, Oregon to well known parents. Her
father was Rabbi Stephen Wise, a founder of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and leader of the liberal
American Jewish Congress. Her mother, Louise Waterman Wise, was
a gifted artist who started one of the countrys first
specialized adoption agencies, the Free Synagogue Child Adoption
Committee, in 1916. Her mothers determination to find homes
for Jewish orphans at a time when adoption was still rare among
Jews made a deep impression on the young Justine.

Child and family welfare became the focus of Poliers long
and distinguished career as a judge. A child of privilege and elite
education—she attended Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Barnard, and
then Yale Law School—Polier was appointed to the Domestic
Relations Court in Manhattan by Fiorello La Guardia, the first judicial
appointment in New York state to elevate a woman above the rank
of magistrate. It was 1935 and Polier was just 32 years old. She
did not resign her judgeship until 1973. After that, she directed
the Juvenile Justice Division of the Childrens Defense Fund.
She also played a pivotal role in mobilizing support for the Wilder
case, a landmark class action suit filed in 1973 that eventually
transformed the sectarian rules of New Yorks large foster
care system, which had been in place since the nineteenth century.

Adoptions were among the happiest events in Poliers courtroom
and she championed adoptions civic potential as well as its
personal value. Providing children with family love and permanent
belonging would produce better, more law-abiding citizens as well
as happier people, she believed. Polier maintained an active role
in the adoption agency her mother founded. Beginning in 1946, she
served as President of its Board of Directors and renamed it Louise
Wise Services to honor her mothers memory. Under the leadership
of Polier and agency Director Florence Brown, Louise Wise Services
was transformed from a sectarian organization devoted to Jewish
adoptions into a national innovator in services for children of
color in the 1950s and 1960s. It pioneered African-American
adoptions, transracial
adoptions, and placed more children for the Indian
Adoption Project than any other private agency in the United
States.

Polier believed that pluralism and separation of church and state
were the essence of Americanism. During the 1930s and 1940s, when
matching was almost universally
accepted, Poliers criticism of it made her extremely controversial.
She rejected the idea that children were the permanent property
of parents or organized religion and suggested that families encompassing
different faiths, races, and cultures were compatible with both
child welfare and democracy. Because most child welfare services
in New York were delivered by sectarian agencies that gave preferential
treatment to their “own” children while excluding others,
Polier equated matching with discrimination and accused its supporters
of being childrens enemies.

This view gained ground during the early stages of the civil rights
movement that followed World War II, when the goal of integration
underlined inter-racial commonalities and leaders like Martin Luther
King Jr. expressed a universalistic morality that was as passionately
admired as it was reviled. Here is how Polier put it in 1960: “By
accepting this [matching] theory, we even justify the denial of
loving family care to children who look different, speak differently,
or have cultural backgrounds different from the stereotype of the
American majority. This bulldozer approach to the newcomer or the
different child, which seeks to level the peaks of cultural
differences in American life, has contributed to the tragic shortcoming
in our services.”